Table of Contents

Runaway

Chance

Soon

Silence

Passion

Trespasses

Tricks

About the Author

Alice Munro is the author of thirteen collections of stories—including Dear Life, Runaway, and Too Much Happiness—as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women. Among the many awards and prizes she received are three Governor General’s Literary Awards and two Giller Prizes in Canada; the Rea Award; the Lannan Literary Award; the National Book Critics Circle Award; and the International Booker Prize. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Alice Munro died in 2024.

Reviews

“Alice Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America. Runaway is a marvel.”—Jonathan Franzen, The New York Times Book Review

“Runaway may very well be the synthesizing work of one of literature’s keenest investigators into the human soul.”—USA Today

“She outjoices Joyce and checkmates Chekhov. . . . Each of the stories in Runaway contains enough lived life to fill a typical novel. . . . Her women are heroic. . . . They endure in the mind of the reader.”—The Boston Globe

“As with so many of Munro’s stories, you read to have your premises altered and deepened. Could anything be better? . . . A beautiful new work.”—Los Angeles Times

“The great Alice Munro proves again why short-story writers bow down toher.”—Vanity Fair

“Runaway is a big dish of Beluga caviar, sailing in on a sparkling bed of ice, with a mother-of-pearl spoon. You remember: This is why you eat, read, make love, whatever—to be left silly with admiration and delight.”—The Washington Post

Nothing is new in Munro's latest collection, which is to say that the author continues to perfect her virtuosic formula in these eight short stories, several of which previously appeared in the New Yorker. While her style typifies the traditionally realistic, often domestic genre of that magazine, Munro's stories are also global, bighearted and warm. In the title story, a housekeeper tries to leave her emotionally abusive husband, entangling her employer in the process. Three interconnected stories-"Chance," "Soon" and "Silence"-follow a schoolteacher as she falls for an older man, returns as a young mother to visit her ailing parents on their farm and much later tries to "rescue" her daughter from a religious cult. In "Tricks," a lonely nurse on a day trip encounters a man from Montenegro and vows to return to his clock shop one year later to resume their affair. In deliberate prose, Munro captures their fleeting moment of passion on a train platform: "This talk felt more and more like an agreed-upon subterfuge, like a conventional screen for what was becoming more inevitable all the time, more necessary, between them." Munro's characters are hopeful and proud as they face both the betrayals and gestures of kindness that animate their relationships. One never knows quite where a Munro story will end, only that it will leave an incandescent trail of psychological insight. Agent, William Morris. 100,000 first printing. (Nov. 14) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

"Alice Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America. Runaway is a marvel." -Jonathan Franzen, The New York Times Book Review "Runaway may very well be the synthesizing work of one of literature's keenest investigators into the human soul." -USA Today "She outjoices Joyce and checkmates Chekhov. . . . Each of the stories in Runaway contains enough lived life to fill a typical novel. . . . Her women are heroic. . . . They endure in the mind of the reader." -The Boston Globe "As with so many of Munro's stories, you read to have your premises altered and deepened. Could anything be better? . . . A beautiful new work." -Los Angeles Times "The great Alice Munro proves again why short-story writers bow down to her." -Vanity Fair "Runaway is a big dish of Beluga caviar, sailing in on a sparkling bed of ice, with a mother-of-pearl spoon. You remember: This is why you eat, read, make love, whatever-to be left silly with admiration and delight." -The Washington Post

Praise from fellow writers:

"Her work felt revolutionary when I came to it, and it still does." -Jhumpa Lahiri

"She is one of the handful of writers, some living, most dead, whom I have in mind when I say that fiction is my religion." -Jonthan Franzen

"The authority she brings to the page is just lovely." -Elizabeth Strout

"She's the most savage writer I've ever read, also the most tender, the most honest, the most perceptive." -Jeffery Eugenides

"Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can."-Julian Barnes

"She is a short-story writer who...reimagined what a story can do." -Loorie Moore

"There's probably no one alive who's better at the craft of the short story." -Jim Shepard

"A true master of the form." -Salman Rushdie

"A wonderful writer." -Joyce Carol Oates